Two years into Syria's civil war, no end in sight

Mar. 25, 2013
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A Syrian woman sits on the ruins of her house, which was destroyed in an airstrike by government warplanes a few days earlier, killing 11 members of her family, in the neighborhood of Ansari, Aleppo, Syria Feb. 6, 2013. / Abdullah al-Yassin, AP

by Tom A. Peter, Special for USA TODAY

by Tom A. Peter, Special for USA TODAY

ANTAKYA, Turkey - As a doctor in a military hospital in Syria's Latakia province, Yahya Rahhal says he witnessed fellow doctors and nurses torture protesters and other civilians when they were brought to his hospital.

Though he had been among the first in his area to protest when the uprising began, he says seeing these human rights abuses pushed him to defect.

"I am not optimistic. I think the regime will never finish off the revolution and in the same way it is very, very, very difficult for the revolutionaries to finish off the regime," he said.

It has been two years since the arrest in Daraa of a few teens who spray-painted anti-regime remarks on a wall sparked a nationwide rebellion.

Syria has seen a continual escalation of violence since, and it appears that the two sides are in a standoff. At the same time, a mounting humanitarian crisis threatens to overwhelm aid workers, and a fractured, increasingly Islamized opposition has sparked serious concerns about what would happen in Syria if President Bashar Assad falls.

"The Syrian political uprising has mutated into carnage, into a nightmare, into a bloodbath," said Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "If the conflict is prolonged, as many of us fear, I fear that the nation as a whole is at stake."

The Syrian uprising has left more than 70,000 people dead, and that number continues to climb at a rate of about 5,000 per month, according to the United Nations. More than 1 million Syrians have registered as refugees outside the country and more than 2.5 million are displaced inside the country. If current trends continue, the U.N. has estimated that there could be as many as 3 million refugees outside the country.

Despite extensive need among many Syrians, the conflict has thus far seen a limited international response and many Syrians complain that they have not received help from the outside world.

So far, the U.S. has pledged $385 million in humanitarian aid to the country, but the amount is small when compared with Syria's scale of need, aid organizations said. To fund just the United Nations World Food Program efforts in Syria from now until June, the organization needs $156 million, which it says it has so far been unable to obtain.

In January, international donors pledged $1.5 billion in assistance, with Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia providing the bulk of the pledge, but so far less than a quarter of that promised money has been reported spent.

Many Syrians struggling amid the current instability were unprepared to deal with such challenges, said Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children.

"This was a middle-income country. This was not a country where families were used to living in very difficult conditions. Certainly there was poverty, but for the most part the families that are going through this crisis now came from middle-class or lower-middle-class background. This is a tremendous shock to these kids," she said.

In addition to the traumas being suffered by the civilian population, divides among rival sects, ethnic groups, and political parties have grown. A nation once noted as home to one of the more moderate populations in the region has become increasingly radicalized as conservative Islamist groups continue to gain broad support, analysts said.

Opposition fighters once united in their desire to see the removal of Assad, now often fall victim to in-fighting and disagreements that have led many analysts to fear that violence will continue in a post-Assad Syria.

"For the longest time we spoke about the Free Syrian Army, but the FSA has gone from being a something people hoped would become a structure to a concept that with every day is just a shadow of its former self," said Aram Nerguizian, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"The reality is that the economics of warfare have exposed them to corruption and have exposed them and the folks who support them to warlordism."

Among Western nations, one of the biggest concerns has been the emergence of radical Islamist groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which the U.S. classified as a terrorist organization because of its ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamist groups have grown in large part because of their access to outside funding, much of which comes from donors in the Arabian Gulf according to numerous reports from Arab news media. Most opposition groups have struggled to operate amid shortages of supplies, relying largely on equipment captured from the Assad army.

"This has become a resource-driven conflict," said Joseph Holliday, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who specializes in Syria. "Most important above all is the ability to provide enough money for salaries for your fighters and have enough weapons.

"It's increasingly a problem for the opposition to have enough money to provide services for the civilians in the areas they control," Holliday said. "The biggest driving factor behind the Islamization of the opposition is that they have access to resources."

Still, the trend toward radicalization that has grown over the past two years may not continue beyond the eventual end of the conflict. A number of Syrians see it more as a relationship of necessity than a statement about the religious leanings of Syrian Muslims.

"As soon things return to any semblance of normality, give it a year or two, three, what's going to happen is people are going to go back to their normal lives, they're going shave off those beards, or they're going to trim them at least," said Malik Al-Abdeh, an independent analyst who specializes in Syria. "There's going to be less cash flow to the armed groups - if Assad's gone, what's the point of paying for a militia."